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A female Lone Star Tick (Amblyomma americanum), an aggressive and common species thoughout the southeastern United States, waiting for her next victim. Photo courtesy of the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Division of Vector Borne Infectious Diseases.

Ah, spring time. The birds are singing, the flowers are blooming — and this week, I found a tick biting my leg. The first tick of the year is a phenological milestone no less significant than the first ruby-throated hummingbird or the first daffodil, but much less enjoyable for the observer. It’s one thing to study the life cycles of animals – another when you inadvertently become a part of one. Still, it has its own rituals no less significant and important than putting away the winter clothe, getting out the camping gear, or spotting your first migrant birds.

In my case, I fetched the tweezers and the bottle of isopropyl alcohol from the medicine cabinet, and, in a maneuver in which I have become extraordinarily well-practiced, extricated the tick off my body with the tweezers. I took especial care to remove its mouthparts, still gripping a tiny chunk of my skin in its jaws. After noting the species and gender of the tick for my records (as well as the time, location and any other relevant observations), I watched the tick wriggle and squirm in my tweezers, clearly aware that something had gone wrong with its plan to suck my blood, but not entirely sure what to do about it. Then, in a cathartic and admittedly macabre release, I flushed said tick down the toilet and sterilized the tweezers and my leg with the alcohol. Just another day in the woods – or in the field, or in the yard or wherever I happened to pick up this unwanted stowaway in the first place.

In general, I abhor cruelty to animals, but ticks seem to bring out the worst in me. It doesn’t help that ticks are stubborn little beasts that are remarkably difficult to kill. Unlike mosquitoes or roaches, they are not easy to crush, and exposing myself to the contents of their insides is the last thing I want to do. Usually, I send them to their death via the municipal sewer system, but at times I have opted for more creative forms of execution: matches, nail polish, duct tape, sealing them in jars and watching them crawl around for days before succumbing. On one memorable occasion, I put a tick into a vial full of alcohol, thinking to preserve it as a research specimen. It took three days for the tick to drown, swimming circular laps in the alcohol the entire time. I ought to feel bad about this, but it proves my point: ticks are tough. Besides, they started it.

If ticks were just aggressive, blood-sucking parasites, that would be bad enough. But they are also the carriers for virulent and unpleasant bacterial diseases little studied by modern science. Lyme disease is the most famous of the lot, but it’s far from the only hazard. Different species of ticks carry less well-known but alarmingly prevalent infections with names that would work well in a genre thriller: babesiosis, 364D rickettsios, Powassan disease, tularemia. Some have no common name, and are known by the binomial Latin of their bacterial instigator, like Borellia miyamotoi, which is a mouthful to announce in social situations. Then there are those diseases whose names attempt to summarize their unpleasant symptoms: Rocky Mountain spotted fever (which is different, mind you, from Colorado tick fever), tickborne relapsing fever, Southern tick-associated rash illness (or STARI for short) and tick paralysis. The least deadly but perhaps most disturbing is the alpha-gal allergy, where a person can develop a reaction to proteins found in mammal tissue, effectively making them unable to eat red meat without the risk of anaphylactic shock. Often overlooked by doctors and frequently undiagnosed for years, tick-borne diseases, whether sudden or slow in their onset, can seriously mess you up.

You can see, then, why I show no mercy to any tick that bites me. Thankfully, most ticks don’t carry infectious diseases, but if I happen to be bitten by one that does, I want to make sure I take it down with me. It seems only fitting, somehow.

There are so many different tick-borne illnesses that it’s difficult for medical professionals, let alone laypeople, to keep track of them all. When my father called me from Massachusetts a few years ago, informing me he’d been diagnosed with ehrlichiosis after he staggered off the Appalachian Trail with a high fever, I was stunned by the diagnosis of a disease I’d never heard of before. “You’re making this up, right?” Turns out, I was just behind the times.

Happily for my father, and for most cases of tick-borne illnesses, the treatment is simple and straightforward. Commonly available antibiotics like doxycycline, applied in an aggressive two-week regime, destroy the bacteria responsible and cure the disease. The key is knowing to get treatment and having a doctor make the appropriate call. In my father’s case, his symptoms were prompt and straightforward and the Massachusetts urgent care doctors were familiar with the disease. It’s not always so easy to get a diagnosis, though, and many people suffer for years without treatment. But taking antibiotics indiscriminately for diseases you might not have isn’t a good idea either. So what’s a nature lover to do?

Like so much in life, prevention is the best way to avoid problems – but that’s easier said than done in a world where the tick population is exploding and you spend most of your time outdoors in prime tick habitat. So one of the rituals of spring is that I start checking myself over every day to make sure I don’t have any unwanted baggage after time in the field – or even a trip to the mailbox. It takes less than a minute, but sometimes I get complacent and forget to start in the spring after a winter of slacking off indoors. Then the next tick-bite teaches me to step up my game, and I get back on track.

A few days after I removed the tick from my leg, the bite site is red and swollen, itching uncontrollably. Happily, though, it doesn’t look as though I have any disease this time. I was bitten by a lone star tick (see photo above), an aggressive, common species in the region, with notoriously irritating saliva – an insult to injury, sure, but not a crippling one. It’s a reminder to me while I’m watching for warblers to keep an eye out for what else might be lurking about – and a reminder that my spring time appearance is an important part of their own yearly rituals of renewal.

After spending its youth feeding on carrion, the adult form of the secondary screwworm drinks nectar from flowers during the summer and fall.

Vultures are stereotyped as patient, but they do not appreciate interruptions during meals. The two black vultures on the sidewalk took off with disgruntled, clumsy flapping, temporarily abandoning their dining experience as I approached. They perched awkwardly in the trees and shifted their weight from foot to foot, ruffling and shaking their wings before settling down to wait me out. Dark silhouettes in the rainy autumn afternoon, they hunched their shoulders like teenagers engrossed with their smartphones—except the object of their attention wasn’t a glowing screen, but the deer carcass stretched out before us.

When I found the buck two days before, he was mostly intact, with only a small wound on the rump from where a car had grazed him as he leapt across the road. The shock of the impact was what had killed him. Now the vultures had joined the party, and transformed the deer from a recognizable animal to a smear of bloody meat on the concrete. They focused the bulk of their efforts on the torso, but the eyeballs were missing, too. I suspected those were a vulture delicacy, and had been eaten first.

In the first two days after the deer’s death, there had been relatively little insect activity, but now that there was an opening in the skull, the flies could enter in greater numbers. Forget the mousey grey of houseflies—these were bigger, brighter, shiny green blow flies, psychedelically iridescent and perpetually spasmodic as they zipped about. Many of them had three distinctive stripes on their back, marking them as secondary screwworms (Cochliomyia macellaria). Unlike primary screwworm adults, which lay their eggs in the tissues of living animals, secondary screwworms require openings in dead flesh. The adults of this species are harmless to humans, feeding on nectar from flowers, but, like the vultures, were drawn to the scent of decay to mate and start their life cycle anew.

Meanwhile, the original wound at the rump was a flurry of activity. The maggots that had hatched over the previous day had drastically increased in size and numbers. They writhed in fierce intensity in the wound, the anus and in the hair and skin surrounding both of those openings. There were so many that they jostled each other off the body entirely and tumbled to the ground below, flopping wildly on the way down. Were they leaving to pupate, or were they now doomed to starve? It was difficult to tell. The smell was intense, rank and primal—simultaneously foreign and intimate.

“…the flies were buzzing round the putrid stomach
from which was emptying black battalions
of larvae, which flowed like a heavy liquid
down the length of those living rags.

All this rose, fell like a wave
or emerged fizzing.
One could say that the body, inflated by some obscure exhalation
now lived by multiplying.”

So wrote the French poet Charles Baudelaire, in his poem “Une Charogne”, at least as I translate it. Charogne is an ugly word, even for native speakers—the last syllable sticks in the back of your throat like an unwelcome head cold, roughly approximating the English word ‘carcass’. It is dead flesh, spoiled meat, an object no longer human (though it might be used to refer to a corpse), some thing bestial, alien, strange and disgusting. Une charogne goes beyond the established boundaries in society to something thoroughly unwholesome, something that has no place, to the point where it can be used as the ultimate insult for a truly loathsome individual.

Poets were the 19th-century equivalent of rock stars, and just like their modern peers, the notorious one were emboldened by uncoventional sexual mores and plagued by depression, debts, drugs and addiction. Baudelaire was no exception in this regard—and, in many ways, a trendsetter. Nothing was too risqué or taboo for his personal and professional life. He enjoyed shocking Victorian readers of his verse with constant juxtapositions of their high ideals with the grim realities of modern urban living he observed on the streets of Paris. The title of his masterwork, Flowers of Evil, succinctly summarizes his aesthetic— beautiful things emerging out of the disturbing and depraved. Unsurprisingly, upon the release of the first edition in 1857, Baudelaire and his publisher were promptly fined for offending public morals.

In “Une Charogne,” Baudelaire’s speaker recounts a charming anecdote to his lover—on a stroll, he encounters a decaying carcass, which he describes in exquisite, and, I could see now, technically accurate detail. Except for the fact that the my carcass’s maggots were grey, not black, I could find no fault with Baudelaire’s depiction of events. Had it been a sunny day, no doubt I would have heard the flies buzzing like the “winnower’s fan,”, but the cool rain made them quiet and the writhing maggots made no sound.

Baudelaire’s realism wasn’t due to an interest natural history. Nor was he into gory descriptions without a purpose. Instead, he goes for the jugular, capitalizing on the age-old human fear of death and decay as he addresses his lover: “And so you will be like this garbage, / this horrible infection, / star of my eye, sun of my being, / you, my angel, my passion!” But not to worry: “Tell the insatiable worms / who will devour you with kisses / I have kept the form and divine essence of my decomposing loves!” (Presumably, he means in his verses, and not in a locked masoleum straight out of an Edgar Allan Poe short story, but you can’t always tell in this genre.)

For Baudelaire, poetry and art triumph over death, even when we find the details of that death to be emotionally and physically repellent. There is still “divine essence” to celebrate even when the beauty of the physical body is lost in the process of decay. It’s the flip side to “gather ye rosebuds while ye may”, the “marble and gilded monuments” of Shakespeare’s sonnets given a gothic twist. Other poets gloss over the gory details, but Baudelaire gives them center stage and even celebrates them, in a twisted way, in rhyming verse.

Just like Baudelaire, I encountered my own carcass on a stroll, but our reactions could not have been more different. Then, as now, death is hushed up, hidden away. We slaughter animals in factories, not in open fields, and quickly bury our pets. Reading Baudelaire in college, I calmly translated and analyzed the lines of his poem, discussed the uses of literary devices and the social implications of his work, but it lacked the vivid intensity of coming face to face with the dead buck on the side of the road. It was very clear to me now that Baudelaire had not been exaggerating for the sake of effect; he had been merely telling the truth. The shocking part was not what he had written, but that he had written of it at all.

Yet when I saw the deer, I was not repelled. Whatever else could be said, there was something inherently real about the maggots, something that could not be edited out, smoothed over and ignored. Almost everything else I had seen on my walk that day was in some way contrived, the result of human ingenuity: the smooth sidewalk appearing out of nowhere on the edge of the subdivision; the cookie-cutter houses with their neatly mowed lawns, the non-native landscaping. Here, I saw life literally emerging out from of death. Even the smell was real – unpleasant, rank, raw, nothing artificial or contrived about it.

Was it the fact that the new life was mostly flies that was the source of the problem? Would we find butterflies so beautiful if their caterpillars devoured flesh instead of plant tissue? No, I decided, it was just as Baudelaire had put it: we hated this sight, and feared it and found it disgusting because we did not want to think about becoming the maggots’ dinner ourselves. This was why Baudelaire had tossed this disgust back in his lover’s face, and why she had undoubtedly recoiled. I began to understand why the Buddha had encouraged monks to go to the charnel-grounds to look at death directly—in order to lose their fear and revulsion of it. After staring at the maggots transforming the deer from dead flesh to new life, and the vultures turning it from food to feathers, I felt appreciation, more than anything else. It certainly wasn’t pretty in the coventional senses of the world, and yet the process was somehow fitting and appropriate. And as I studied them, the flies and vultures became beautiful to me, too.

A few days later, most of the carcass was gone. There were eight black vultures feeding now, and they had stripped most of the edible flesh except for the head. Had they been the ones to drag the body farther from the sidewalk, or had that been done by squeamish humans who didn’t want reminders of mortality intruding on their walks? The majority of the maggots disappeared with the flesh, but a few clung to the remaining skin and bones, or wandered on the ground nearby.

The next day, a solitary turkey vulture picked serenely at the skeleton. (Unlike black vultures, which feed communally, turkey vultures always dine alone.) Most of the flesh was stripped entirely off the head, and the lower jaw had been dislocated. Now there was only a few tattered bits of skin, the connected spinal column, and misceallaneous scattered bones. The smell had mostly abated, but flared up strongly when I lifted the antlers to look inside the skull. The brain was the last thing to go.

In less than a week, the deer had all but vanished into a flurry of black feathers and buzzing wings, now dispersed across the landscape. The swiftness and efficiency of the process was startling, even as it unfolded in front of me. The tissues and sinews of the buck lived on in a multiplication of life forms, just as Baudelaire had described. He was a keen observer with a poet’s eye for details of beauty’s inevitable decay. But had he lingered longer over his carcass, he might have also seen what I saw—that beauty, too, emerges from the beast, and we need not fear the process.

“There is magic in running water, for after I have thought its life history all out there is still much unexplained.”

These are the words of my great-grandfather, from a book he wrote ninety-three years ago called Man’s Spiritual Contact with the Landscape. I never met him, as he died long before I was born, but from his words I can tell that we have much in common.

Every morning I walk beside the LaPlatte River in Shelburne and contemplate the life history of its waters. One morning this February a frozen flood made the magic in those waters visible. Rain on snow during a warm snap caused the level of the river to rise quickly during the night. By morning the river was several feet above its normal water level. The water fell gradually, but the temperature plunged quickly, and during the next night a thin layer of ice formed on the surface of the waters, marking the height of the water at the coldest part of the night. It was as though someone had pressed a pause button on the flood, and an eighth-inch-thick sheet of ice clung to trees and sticks, hovering six inches above the ground.

The frozen floodwaters of the LaPlatte River this past February.

My dog and I crashed through this frozen landscape the next morning and reveled in the sparkling beauty of a world draped in a silver cloak of ice. Now, in April, the flood plain no longer sparkles, exactly – it wears the drab browns and greys of early spring. Bits of green poke through here and there, but for the most part every surface is still coated with the fine layer of silt left behind by receding flood waters. I revel in this landscape, too, because a functioning floodplain ecosystem is a beautiful thing.

That thin layer of silt represents a fresh collection of nutrient-rich sediment for the hungry plants and trees of the flood plain. The plants of the flood plain are specially adapted to live in this water- and nutrient-rich environment, and they often depend on annual flooding not just for nutrients, but also to spread their seeds and carry away any less well-adapted competition. Different plants adapt to different environments of the flood plain, some preferring the naturally formed berms just beyond the banks of the river, while others are more suited to the slow-to-drain boggy back-swamps. These, too, depend on flooding for their formation.

Marks created on a floating chunk of ice when it was carried beneath a tree overhanging the river.

Roiling and fast moving flood waters contain a lot of energy, enough energy to carry much more than just silt. Sand, stones, and larger sediment often get swept up and transported long distances in a rushing spring river. When a river leaves its banks it immediately loses much of its energy. The water slows and spreads out across the floodplain, dropping first the heavy sediment, such as sands and gravel, and then the finer silts and organic materials further out. This sorting by size is what results in the gentle berms immediately past the banks of the river, and the silt that travels further is smaller, so it packs more tightly together when it reaches the ground, creating the slowly draining back-swamps beyond the berms.

A wood frog found in April along the floodplain of the LaPlatte.

Right now, in the pools of flood and melt water filling the back-swamps, peepers and wood frogs sing their spring chorus of lust in hopes of attracting a mate. These swamps and pools dry completely late in the year, and so sustain fewer aquatic predators that might eat the breeding amphibians or their eggs, so these pools are important for their survival. And their survival should be important to us, because amphibians are the main predators of mosquito larvae, who also favor the standing waters of back-swamps. Another frequent inhabitant of back-swamps, eastern newts, are capable of eating over 300 mosquito larvae in one day.

Many mammals also rely on the floodplain forests for their survival. Chipmunks and minks prey on the amphibians, and then in turn feed foxes, coyotes, and bobcats. Beavers are the architects of the channel, building dams and lodges that move the flow, eroding this bank or that, building sand bars with the changing flow path. Birds ranging from tiny wrens and finches all the way up to red-tailed hawks, ravens, and turkey vultures also feed on the life that surrounds the river.

My grandfather’s book included a chapter for each month of the year, but he began with the running waters of April. As I walk beside the river each morning it is not so difficult to see why, for the river and its tributaries are like veins through the landscape: they carry life. Life that wakes and grows and flies and sings in April. So next time you find yourself beside a river in April, look beyond the dull grey patina of silt and enjoy the magic that is running water.

Shelby Perry is a second year student in the Field Naturalist program. Her great-grandfather, Stephen F. Hamblin, was the author of the book Man’s Spiritual Contact with the Landscape and co-author of Handbook of Wild Flower Cultivation. He was a professor of horticulture and landscape architecture at Harvard University and the Rhode Island School of Design and founded the Lexington Botanic Garden.

Two hundred feet above the lush Ardèche River in the south of France lies the barely visible entrance to a cave slotted between massive limestone cliffs. Narrow passageways connect multiple chambers that, once illuminated, reveal the unmistakable walls of Chauvet Cave, used 32,000 years ago by early humans who adorned this cave in paintings. The most famous panel: sixteen lions pursuing a herd of bison.

While the culture that painted these walls is long gone, and the species of lion depicted extinct, Chauvet Cave displays Paleolithic evidence of fascination with large feline predators. Did these people revere the formidable cave lion, fear it, or consider it sacred? Why did they feel compelled to illustrate these creatures in such lifelike detail when simply staying alive required most of their effort?

As we contend with the possible re-colonization by cougars, Puma concolor, of the eastern half of the United States, these ageless questions rise again. Why is our relationship with big cats so fraught, and why do we find them so captivating?

Underwater Panther, National Museum of the American Indian. Licensed under Public Domain.

Native American tribes had specific and varied perceptions of cougars, ranging from fear to worship. Hopi tribes, dwelling in high Arizona desert, considered cougars fierce guardians of their people. Cheyenne tribal mythology tells the story of women suckling cougar cubs like children so that they would grow up and kill deer for the tribe to consume. Pueblo tribes historically boasted a band of hunters called “cougar men,” who used a cry that mimicked the cougars’ caterwaul. Tribes living in the Great Lakes region feared the underwater panther, a mythical monster with the body of a panther, the scales of a snake, deer antlers, and feathers of birds of prey. The underwater panther was a harbinger of death in some cultures; in others, its tail had healing powers. The skill and beauty of this animal inspired vivid stories and traditions in native cultures, casting the cougar as a fierce hunter, a strong guardian, and a worthy opponent.

While many Native American cultures respected cougars, European settlers took a more singular opinion of the animals, steeped in religious mistrust and a fear of large predators. When exploring Florida in 1565, M. John Hawkins wrote that, “there are lions and tygres as well as unicorns; lions especially.” In 1634, William Woods recounted to the New England Prospect that “some likewise being lost in the woods have heard such terrible rarings, as have made them much agast; which must eyther be Devills or Lyons.”

Elusive as unicorns and howling like devils, cougars did not stand much of a chance in the face of settlers imaginations. The Damned Thing, a short story written by Ambrose Pierce in 1893, casts the cougar as an invisible killer, unseen to the human eye, detectable only as it passes through grass. Aggressive hunting of cougars and their prey, along with deforestation of cougar habitat, decimated cougar populations in the eastern United States, extirpating them by 1881. Like exorcising an evil spirit from the body, European settlers eliminated what they could not comprehend.

Referenced as a “glamorous killer” by The New York Times in 2013, we now know much more about how these true carnivores live. Contributing to its near-mythical status, a single cougar once took 15 sheep overnight from one ranchers’ flock in Wyoming, seizing an opportunity for easy picking. When hunting, they use ultrasonic hearing, stalking prey and pouncing from close range. They aim to break the neck of their target from behind. If unsuccessful, cougars will literally go for the jugular. Cougars do not eat all of their prey at once—rather, they cache it, cover it in leaves and duff, and come back to feed intermittently. Family or pack cooperation while hunting is rarely observed, with the exception of mothers hunting for their young. That telltale grimace captured in photographs on many a cougar indicates the use of their “vomeronasal” organ on the roof of their mouths, an olfactory adaptation that helps them track prey. Surprisingly, there have only been around 100 attacks on humans, and 20 fatalities in the U.S. and Canada since 1890.

After a long absence, some evidence points to a resurgence of cougars in the Northeast. Sue Morse, a naturalist who studies predators in Vermont, proposes that the cats making the push eastward are transient tomcats and younger males, looking for a home territory as populations increase in the west. Reforestation and the reestablishment of a prey base in the Northeast over the last 400 years has enabled cougars to return. Since the late 1990s, cougar sightings, scat, and paw prints have been recorded in multiple eastern states and provinces, including Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Brunswick, West Virginia, Vermont, and Quebec.

Many conservationists remain thrilled about the return of this fabled predator, once the most widely dispersed animal in the Western hemisphere. General understanding of cougars in the east remains limited and dominated by curiosity, but Clary Nielsen of Cougar Net, a nonprofit research organization dedicated to studying cougars, thinks that with an influx of cougars, attitudes are probably going to change. It is difficult not to worry for them, foolish as it may be to worry for an animal perfectly adapted to kill. What if what happened in the 19th century happens again, and the tides turn from fascination to vengeance?

Cougars, at a glance, are everything that humans are not. Silent, graceful, and agile, they pass through the world largely unnoticed until it is far too late for their quarry. Does our fascination with big cats stem from a desire to understand something truly wild, both frightening and beautiful? Or does our imagination, lacking in details, turn the cougar into something mythical, and ourselves into its prey? Human beings, so culturally different today from our ancestors 32,000 years ago, display an easy dominance over the animal kingdom. And yet, predators unseen still possess a certain unpredictable allure.

Photo: K Fink, NPS. Licensed under Public Domain

Chris Bolgiano, a nature writer who has written and contributed to multiple books on cougars, suggests that we anticipate their arrival because it would exonerate us from the guilt humans feel from abusing the natural world and extirpating animals like the cougar. But perhaps it is our own primal desire, carried through millennia, that longs to see cougars and their inimitable power. Both magnetic and frightening, the presence of the cougar might be the closest that we come to redemption.

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Information gathered from: Keeping Track, Vermont Public Radio, Cougar Net, The New York Times, Mountain Lion: An Unnatural History of Pumas and People, by Chris Bolgiano, and The Eastern Cougar, edited by Chris Bolgiano and Jerry Roberts.

Lyra Brennan is a first-year student in the Ecological Planning Program

At first I thought the big black shape in the lane was a piece of burst tire. Then the tire held out a slow, prehistoric foot and took a step. Its long neck shifted into view as I drove by, and I realized it was a huge snapping turtle. In the few seconds I’d been watching, several cars had already whizzed past, missing it by inches. It was halfway across the first of eight lanes of traffic it would need to traverse to reach the other side of I-93.

I don’t normally cry over road kill. But a mile down the road I pulled into the breakdown lane and burst into tears. I imagined a cop stopping to help with the emergency and discovering, inside the Subaru Forester with, of course, Vermont plates, a young woman sobbing over a turtle who last she saw was unharmed.

The futility of its journey had overwhelmed me. The turtle, moving with the confident plod that has served its species for 40 million years, had looked so out of its element on the highway. It had completed only a fraction of an impossible crossing. This creature, steadfastly putting one foot in front of the other, was utterly screwed.

Early each summer, snapping turtles leave the water to lay eggs on land, traveling up to four miles from home. The one I saw last June may have been a mother looking for a good spot to dig a nest, or a young turtle dispersing from its original home range. Unlike most animals, female snapping turtles disperse over greater distances than males and keep similarly sized home ranges (eight acres on average, in the north). Some nomadic females have no home range at all; others return to the same nest site annually. Since they can retain sperm in their bodies and use it over multiple seasons, they do not need to mate every year.

This strategy has worked well for Chelydra serpentina—so well that it is the ancestor of 80 percent of all living turtles. In fact, snapping turtles have hardly changed in appearance from the earliest turtle, which evolved over 200 million years ago. In other words, proto snapping turtles had already been around for 150 million years when Tyrannosaurus rex appeared on the scene.

Having survived two major extinction events in close to their current shape, modern snapping turtles faced virtually no predators once full grown until a century ago, when the automobile was invented. Now most females living in developed areas die on roads after only a few nesting seasons. Their natural life spans, although they average 30 years, can last over 80 years. In other words, the individual I saw on I-93 could have been older than the highway itself.

This time of year, snapping turtles have buried themselves in the mud of a pond, swamp, or slow-moving stream and begun hibernation, deep enough that the mud around them will not freeze. While they often do spend the winter within their home range, they can travel up to two and a half miles away to hibernate and then return to their territories in the spring. Individuals sometimes stay faithful to a few particular hibernacula, rotating between them year after year. If a site becomes popular, turtles can end up stacked on top of each other for the winter. This group hibernation makes them vulnerable to occasional predation by otters.

Still, I think a turtle stands a better chance unconscious against an aquatic carnivore than crossing an interstate highway. I can only hope that my turtle had already laid her eggs and was on the way back to her pond. Perhaps her hatchlings, if not she herself, now lie safe in the mud, waiting till spring.

Sonia DeYoung is a second-year student in the Field Naturalist Program.

Here in Vermont, the passage of fall foliage marks the arrival of stick season. For a smaller group of birding enthusiasts, it also marks the triumphant return of the snow geese. Every year, thousands of snow geese descend upon the Dead Creek Wildlife Refuge in Addison, seeking respite and fuel on their journey south from the Canadian arctic to the mid-Atlantic coast. This year, though, things might look a bit different.

Snow geese erupt in flight over Lake Champlain in 2013

Since the mid 1960s, the raucous arrival of thousands of honking snow geese (Chen caerulescens) through the gray October clouds has been a spectacle worthy of a field day. The geese descend from their 2000-foot cruising altitude in smooth uniformity, applying the brakes dramatically in “falling leaf” formation as they approach Dead Creek below. Landing en masse on the shore and in the creek, the air fills with a cacophony of what seem to be triumphant shouts: “Glad we made it!”

As celebrated as their arrival is in Vermont, snow geese are anything but rare. In fact, they have the distinction of being one of the most abundant waterfowl in North America[i]. Once they arrive here in Vermont, they’ll chow voraciously on the region’s finest assortment of grass and sedge roots. Or, at least they used to. Murmurs in the birding community suggest snow geese dietary preferences are changing, and their migratory patterns are changing to follow their taste buds.

This change in forage is purely out of necessity. Populations have increased dramatically over the last one hundred years, the result of a hunting ban imposed in 1916 to allow a dwindling population to rebound[ii]. And rebound they did. Although hunting reopened in 1975, snow geese are now so plentiful that food is proving hard to come by; they must find food, or they’ll starve. So, what’s on the menu? Agricultural plant remains – the most abundant food around. Some geese have become so reliant on agricultural fields for food that they are now adjusting their migratory routes to stopover in prime farmland.

Despite plentiful agriculture in Vermont’s Champlain Valley, our forage is proving inferior to that in New York. Here, nearby farmers typically harvest their corn for cow silage, which leaves little waste material left for munching. Across the lake in New York, farmers often harvest corn as a commodity, leaving the stalks behind[iii]. As a result, the number of geese visiting Dead Creek each year has declined dramatically. In 2005, ten thousand snow geese stopped over; in 2006, that number dropped to five thousand[iv]. Since then, number have held steady at three to five thousand each year, with around two thousand geese already reported for this fall[v].

A Ross’s goose sits amidst snow geese in Lake Champlain in 2013.

Is the geese’s absence necessarily concerning? If you’re one of the many visitors who make the annual trip to Dead Creek adorned with binoculars, puffy coats and neck warmers, their absence may make you feel as empty as Thanksgiving spent without the chattering, bickering, well-loved guests. And, if you’re a wildlife biologist, keeping the wildlife management area an attractive stopover spot for geese helps minimize damage to neighbors’ crops, increases public interest in wildlife and increases the potential for hunting (another solution to limit population growth). There is incentive to keep the birds close.

Snow goose biologists have planned for just this scenario[vi]. What to do if the snow geese disappear: plant crops to lure them back to Addison. Vermont officials have already converted upland portions of Dead Creek to agricultural fields featuring a rotating crop of corn and hay, although the geese have yet to find it[vii]. It’s a crop artillery race against New York, and the winner is by no means fixed.

While a visit to Dead Creek this fall may not yield the same giddying barrage of honking that it has in past years, that doesn’t mean they’re gone for good. If you’re in need of a weekend excursion, hop in your car, drive down to Route 17 in Addison, and train your eyes to the sky. Bring a snow-globe for good luck – perhaps a good shake will prompt a flock of one thousand geese to flutter through the clouds in the first big snowstorm of fall.

Hannah Phillips is a first year student in the Ecological Planning Program.

Imagine that you are the size of a Reese’s cup and, to many animals, equally delicious. You occupy a precarious position in the food chain; you are a danger to many, and safe from few. You dine on insects, slugs, snails and even the occasional small bird. Predators that hover above include herons, hawks, and waterfowl. Raccoons, foxes and snakes lurk behind stumps on the ground, awaiting your misstep. Water, your true home, swarms with otter, mink and bullfrogs, each hungry for their main course delicacy. How do you, a northern leopard frog (Lithobates pipiens), survive such an onslaught?

Many of us may think that we witness a frog’s primary defense as it jumps away. But this erratic hopping demonstrates a last-ditch effort to stay alive. Before he leaps for his life, stillness keeps him hidden among the leaves; camouflage is his best friend. Numerous amphibians employ camouflage to protect themselves from potential predators, but few excel in this department as well as the northern leopard frog. Under the cloak of camo, this frog gains the opportunity to find dinner without always becoming it.

The waning months of summer in Vermont bring about new dangers for these cryptic croakers, as they venture from the water’s edge into meadows to forage for food. Luckily, hues of green and brown underlie rounded black spots that decorate the skin in a pattern that serves function over fashion. These colors blend in inconspicuously to the fields of forbs, grasses, and goldenrods in a cloak of camouflage. This crypsis is termed background matching.

The use of background matching is not uncommon elsewhere in the animal kingdom. A white-tailed deer fawn (Odocoileus virginianus) resting on the forest floor, an eastern screech owl (Megascops asio) waiting motionless in the hollow of a tree, or a spring peeper (Pseudacris crucifer) hiding amongst the autumn leaves are all able to avoid detection with their special camouflage. Whether feather, fur or frog, these animals are a rare treat if your eye can pick them out of the patchwork.

With the warmer portion of fall still upon us, spend a Saturday in the meadows of the Champlain Valley and try to catch a glimpse of a leopard frog during its feeding forays. Vermont winters hit hard for these amphibians. Soon, they’ll head for the trenches with the northern map turtles (Graptemys geographica). Both of these cold-blooded critters move to well-oxygenated waters to escape the brutal winter winds and hunker down into hibernation. They begin to tuck themselves in by late October to early November, and won’t fully emerge until February or March. By then, it will be time to fatten up, find a mate, and blend into their surroundings once more.

Nature is in peril. Biodiversity is plummeting. Species are going extinct 100 to 1000 times faster than normal. How many times have you read an introduction beginning that way? It’s depressing because it’s true. The ensuing article or book usually offers plenty of advice on what actions we must take to stem the tide of extinction and climate change and how to convince the uninformed public to care about it. But what about us — conservationists who already care about the deterioration of the natural world as we know it and who struggle with it emotionally? How can we find solace?

The current issue of Field Notes, the annual publication of UVM’s Field Naturalist and Ecological Planning programs, reflects on how we can continue to delight in nature even as we stare these sobering environmental issues in the face.

From Donald Kroodsma’s The Singing Life of Birds: The Art and Science of Listening to Birdsong.

By Joanne Garton

Formal study of birdsong has long been fascinated with the who, how, and why of some of our most ubiquitous outdoor sounds. Many guides encourage new birders to learn their species by ear, listening for bird presence rather than relying on sight alone. Researchers have examined everything from a songbird’s syrinx (the bird equivalent of a larynx) to its wing morphology to determine how a bird makes its song. Ecologists have monitored bird behavior to suggest why they sing and why birdsong makes us feel happy and safe. (For further thoughts on birdsong as a cultural ecosystem service, take a look at my research proposal on the valuation of birdsong in education.)

As a student of an Applied Wildlife Management course and an avid musician and fiddler, and a complete beginner when it comes to birds, I decided to examine the what of birdsong. More specifically, I was curious about the musical what, the pieces and patterns of sound that make up a spring morning or summer evening. Do birds sing in pitches and tones like we do? Do they prefer certain keys? Do they take a breath with each phrase? And how hard could it be to learn to reproduce birdsongs? (Quite hard, it turns out). Click on the bird names that look like this to hear my renditions of some of these birds’ songs. Continue reading →

Two wings and a prayer carry a Blackpoll Warbler on a remarkable journey to South America each autumn. Well, actually, two wings and the audacity to pull off one of the most amazing feats of migration on the planet: a non-stop, trans-Atlantic flight lasting up to three days.

With most of us only speculating for decades about this amazing journey, my colleagues at the Vermont Center for Ecostudies (VCE) today announced proof. Blackpoll Warblers fitted with miniature tracking devices took off from points in either Nova Scotia or the northeastern U.S. and flew south over the Atlantic, with no safe place to land, until reaching Caribbean islands roughly 1,600 miles away.

“This is one of the most ambitious migrations of any bird on earth,” said VCE’s Executive Director, Chris Rimmer, co-author of a research paper published today on the warbler flights. “We’ve also documented one of the longest nonstop, overwater flights ever recorded for a songbird.” Continue reading →